Things worth knowing

Wednesday, 21 March 2012

I'm good thanks

[This is a reblog of a post by a meme tumblr which posts these memes made by 'English majors', and they're pretty snobby about correct punctuation and usage, though you wouldn't know it from the amount of mistakes in their posts. They're also snobby about everything else, including what books they've read, how books are better than everything else, and how nerdy they are. Their post consists of just the meme; the comments below are mine.]

Now, setting aside the fact that some adaptations are a gazillion times better than the book (Lord of the Rings springs to mind), this is about interchanging ‘well’ and ‘good’. Normally, this peeve centres around saying ‘I’m good’ when what the prescriptivists think you should say is ‘I’m well’. I have NEVER EVER heard anyone say anything like the text in the image (‘The adaptation did a well job of…’). I can’t imagine that anyone possibly could - it’s not just wrong in a prescriptive sense, it sounds wrong in a genuinely ungrammatical sense. But hey, dialects differ.

But my guess, if anyone actually did say this, is that it’s because they’ve been told so many times about not saying ‘good’ when you should say ‘well’, that they’ve hyper-corrected. That’s when you change something that was already right because you’re worried about getting it wrong and not quite clear on what the rules are. It’s like when stereotypical Cockney policemen put ‘h’ on words that shouldn’t have it, because they’re hyper-correcting and know they shouldn’t drop the h. So, you know, if this bothers you, stop telling people off for saying ‘I’m good’. If you hadn’t done that, none of this would ever have happened.